The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the 1940 novel by Carson McCullers, is one of those books that I’ve known about for many years and finally got around to reading. Sometimes classics just escape your attention. I read McCullers’ novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe for a class on short novels in high school, and I really enjoyed it.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was McCullers’ first novel, and it’s a fascinating portrait of the residents of a small Southern town. McCullers does a wonderful job of entering into the psyches of the different characters.
The characters are an eccentric bunch. There’s the proud Black doctor Benedict Mady Copeland, cafe owner Biff Brannon, Socialist drifter Jake Blount, and tomboy Margaret Kelly, nicknamed “Mick.” At the hub of this wheel of disparate characters is John Singer, who is deaf and speaks only in sign language. The other characters all confide in Singer, and he becomes something of a priestly figure, offering them a kind of silent benediction and absolution. Singer himself remains inscrutable, but that does not matter to the people who confide in him.
McCullers describes the interest in the town about Singer: “The rumors about him grew bolder...The rich thought that he was rich and the poor considered him a poor man like themselves. And as there was no way to disprove these rumors they grew marvelous and very real. Each man described the mute as they wished him to be.” (p.223) Singer becomes a mirror for whoever interacts with him. This might not be intentional on Singer’s part—people see in him what they want to see. It’s not his fault if people read into his personality.
The characters in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter are all rich, vibrant, complex, living people. The novel is a testament to McCullers’ skill and her ability to see through the eyes of other people. Mick Kelly’s love of music, and her desire to become a musician are especially heartfelt and poignant. For me, Mick’s adolescent yearning for something more became the emotional center of the novel.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a novel that speaks deeply to our need to connect to each other as human beings, and how difficult it can be to find those connections. It’s a novel that everyone should read.
